1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for factory management. More particularly, this invention relates to an interface used for monitoring of factory objects in an object-oriented factory management system.
2. Background Information
Management of a factory which manufactures a product such as semiconductors or aircraft for example, requires monitoring the status of all aspects in the factory, including raw materials on hand, components, labor resources, and machinery at every step of the manufacturing process. Also, in order to maintain a full range of information regarding partially completed products, a scheme for monitoring manufacturing will also maintain a list of current works in progress. The maintaining of such information allows a manager to determine whether his resources are being used at their full potential, and whether stores of raw materials should be replenished. It also allows a factory supervisor to determine the status of a customer's order and allow for scheduling of critical resources such as labor and machinery.
One prior approach to managing a factory was the WORKSTREAM factory management system manufactured by Consilium, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. In the WORKSTREAM system, raw materials, machines, labor units, and finished products may be viewed or manipulated. An approach taken by the WORKSTREAM system and other factory management systems is to prompt users for input from a keyboard to determine the status of labor, machines and other things in the factory environment. In addition, this product allowed the tracking of products as they were manufactured to allow scheduling and efficient resource management for running the factory at its fullest potential. This system would query the user during certain operations for information and the user would input that information after being prompted by the system.
One problem with previous systems was that the relationships between factory objects such as components, raw materials, labor, machinery, among others, was not clearly presented to the user of the system. In addition, the factory structure was not clearly defined in the system and thus was not clearly represented to the user. This prior art system also did not present a way in which various information could be linked to manufactured products in the system, such as bills of materials, bills of resources, etc. Lastly, the system did not provide a way of viewing manufacturing steps for a given product in the system, or for testing to assure the quality of a manufactured product.